Like many artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, Manoucher Yektai was never truly an abstract painter. His paintings, like the paintings of his better-known peers Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, contain visual cues that integrally connect them to the world beyond the canvas. With their characteristically thick and vigorously applied paint, which often conveys a discernible sense of volumetric space, and their delicately hued palette summoning the effects of light as it falls upon physical entities in space, Yektai’s works suggest intimations of phenomena that exceed their purely formal and material properties. In this regard, one could say that abstraction for Yektai—and, for that matter, for many of his contemporaries—was a decidedly transitive operation: the painter abstracts something, taking a subject, whether it is a human figure, an object, or even an emotional state or affective memory, and through an array of distilling and distorting processes renders it indeterminate, enigmatic, and in a constant state of becoming. In this way the painted image appears ambiguous while still maintaining a compelling allusiveness, which would ideally engender a response and a degree of recognition from an empathetic viewer. 

Yektai’s particularly transitive approach to abstraction—and painting more generally—is evident in an untitled work from 1960 in which a cluster of pink and white rosettes of thick paint surrounded by an array of diagonal dark-green brushstrokes in the upper right-hand corner summons a still life or perhaps the bough of a flowering tree, thus setting the scene of the picture as some sort of landscape. The painting’s oscillation between two possible genres to a large extent pivots on how a viewer interprets a more angular armature of grayish-white passages in the center of the image, whose geometric contours can be construed as possibly a flower box as seen from above, or, perceived within a landscape matrix, as an architectural element, perhaps the eaves of a clapboard house, although the six long dark diagonal bands underneath this form and the large dark mass of painting in the upper left corner complicate either reading. Likewise, the presence of what appears to be writing across this area further disorients the painting’s possible subject, simultaneously compromising the picture’s illusory depth by emphasizing the canvas’s materially flat and two-dimensional surface while the presence of language underlines the work’s communicative aims. 

On one level these calligraphic elements were a function of Yektai’s practice of creating his paintings on the horizontal axis of the floor or on a table instead of on the more conventional vertical axis of an easel or wall. This rather eccentric mode of applying paint, which he shared with other artists of the period such as Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Helen Frankenthaler, can be understood as part of this generation’s desire to reconceive the medium of painting, seeing it not as an illusionistic window onto the world but rather as a surface for gestural impression and inscription. If, according to certain scholars, this reorientation of painting onto the horizontal axis would emphasize the immediacy and embodied materiality of the work of art, it could be argued that for an artist like Yektai, who also wrote poetry in his native Farsi, a language whose calligraphic alphabet blurred the distinction between gesture and symbol, this act of aligning painting with writing could emphasize its capacity to serve as a means of communication, reference, and even self-expression, all of which is to say, its transitivity. 

This affinity between transitive painting and poetic missive is elaborated upon in another untitled work Yektai produced the following year, in 1961, in which a tabletop still life featuring two envelopes, each bearing marks of handwriting, can be discerned. (The words “I love you” can be read on the one closest to the top of the picture.) A striking green band culminating in one of the impasto globules of paint that would frequently appear in Yektai’s work from this period respectively denote the painting’s overhead perspective and mode of production; its tapered tail appears to recede like a flagpole seen from above while the congealed skin of its circular head signals its creation on the horizontal axis. Like Pollock’s dripped paint, which makes gravity a creative element in its appearance, Yektai’s thick pools of pigment with their almost primeval swirls marshal the physical laws of nature to invest subjective expression with a degree of materiality and arguably even metaphysical transcendence. By orienting viewers to experience the imagery as if looking down upon it, such works also crucially invite beholders to share the artist’s own view of the canvas during its moment of creation, so that, as the critic Harold Rosenberg would memorably propose in his 1952 article “The American Action Painters,” the physical gestures and creative decisions of the artist could become the meaning of the painting itself. In this way Yektai’s work, again like that of many of his New York School peers, drew upon a romantic ideal which postulated a vision of the work of art as a message from an individual artist to an audience who might be able to understand and emotionally empathize with its content, despite any distance of time and space separating sender and recipient. 

Rosenberg would in fact cite Yektai’s work in another essay from 1962 in which he reiterated his conception of such an active—and, arguably, transitive—dynamic of artistic creation and reception. This essay was written as a riposte to his critical rival Clement Greenberg, who had recently railed against artists like de Kooning (and by extension Yektai) who practiced what the critic called “homeless representation” in which the techniques of illusionistic painting, such as chiaroscuro and allusive figuration, are adopted for ostensibly abstract ends. One can perceive such techniques at work in some of Yektai’s more categorically abstract works, such as an untitled painting from 1960 in which an assemblage of thickly painted bands invests the picture with a discernible sense of spatial arrangement so that certain passages appear in front of others, while the modulated pigment, with its traces of lighter and darker hues, suggests volumetric recession and projection. 

According to Greenberg, such vestiges of illusionism compromised the work of art’s avowed “purity,” associating it with other creative—and notably narrative—practices like theater and literature and, more damagingly, making it vulnerable (so he asserted, although this thesis has never been proven by research) to ideological and commercial manipulation. Viewed from a twenty-first-century perspective, these paradigms of modernist aesthetics which extol the ethical and even political superiority of a professed pure and nonobjective abstraction appear exceedingly academic, and their dogmatic policing of boundaries with terms like purity seems tainted by their possible complicity with the politics of white supremacy. (In this regard it is notable, if unfortunately all too predictable, that Yektai’s “Persian” heritage was frequently mentioned by critics as a possible explanation for the bold colors and Orientalist sense of decoration in his painting, suggesting, as one writer put it, his “ethnic novelty.”) 

And while Greenberg’s dismissive dig of “homelessness” has its own problematic political implications, both in terms of class and nationalism, it is in fact possible to imagine how certain artists, especially those who were themselves immigrants—or, one might say, who were transient—would have found such homelessness not simply just an inevitable aspect of the process of painting but, moreover, something of a virtue. Yektai himself understood how his transitive conception of painting entailed a certain transience, circumventing the dominant categories for defining visual art in the second half of the twentieth century. In an interview published in the New York Times in 1983 the artist claimed that, if a beholder described his paintings as abstractions, he would reply, “I’ll call them figures. If they call them figures, I’ll say they’re abstractions.” As early as 1952 one critic would revealingly describe his works as “near abstract.” Yektai’s avoidance of such labels was no doubt in part motivated by a general reluctance among members of the New York School to be pigeonholed into a specific movement or style. Yet it could be argued that Yektai’s identity as an immigrant and something of an “ethnic novelty” within the American art scene allowed him to recognize the limitations, if not the oppressiveness, that often accompanied the rhetoric of purity associated with nonobjective (i.e., abstract) painting in modernist art criticism. It is not surprising in this regard that some of the most remarkable practitioners of such allusive, transitive, “homeless” abstraction, such as Helen Frankenthaler, Norman Lewis, and Joan Mitchell, were women or people of color. For them, the question of representation (and its apparent antithesis, abstraction) was not simply a matter of aesthetic doxa but a vital political issue. That is to say, for artists who did not experience the full benefits of political representation, the possibilities of pictorial representation were far from played out. 

Abstract Expressionism was in many ways a style born of outsiders and immigrants, and a number of the most celebrated members of the New York School, such as de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hoffman, and Mark Rothko, were, like Yektai, émigrés. For these artists, the promise of intersubjective and intercultural communication was likely a hard- earned value and the idea of the creative act as a form of both self- invention and self-discovery was a virtue. In fact, one could argue that Rosenberg’s conception of action painting as “the artist’s re-creation of himself and as an evidence to the spectator of the kind of activities involved in this adventure” was ideally suited for artists like Yektai, who, despite being regularly consigned to an identity that positioned him outside of the dominant contours of modern subjectivity, sought to establish his place within the history of modernism. As Rosenberg’s normalized use of “himself” in the above passage indicates, and as numerous scholars have since shown, such acts of self-realization were typically gendered and racialized, thus leaving many artists marginalized and underrepresented. And yet it is equally possible to see how Rosenberg’s vision of “the use of art to recognize the self through visual experience” would have been especially appealing precisely to those who did not enjoy the full benefits of representation in the public sphere. Yektai’s transitive, homeless abstractions of still lifes, landscapes, and portraits sought to destabilize the expectations that these traditional genres offer. By inviting spectators to reexperience the work’s creation and, as a corollary, possibly empathize with a vision different than their own, they express the hope for new and surprising encounters between artist and audience. In this way, one might see such transitive displacement as something to be embraced so that we might, as Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten have argued, come to recognize our shared condition of “being together in homelessness.”8 Such an awareness would in turn entail a mode of living that precludes a search for essences (whether in terms of identity or artistic media) and see transitive practices like Yektai’s, not in terms of the dictates of aesthetic doctrine based on medium specificity, but as a specific means of self-determination through artistic discovery.

NOTES

1. On the significance of the horizontal axis in postwar art, see Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55–92, and Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 243–320.

2. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51, no. 8 (December 1952): 22–33, 48–50; reprinted in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 23–39.

3. Harold Rosenberg, “After Next What?,” in The Anxious Object (New York: Horizon Press, 1964), 257–63; Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in John O’Brian, ed., The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1959–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 124.

4. J[ames] S[chuyler], “Reviews and Previews,” Art News 56, no. 8 (December 1957): 12.

5. Lawrence Van Gelder, “‘A Studio in My Pocket,’” New York Times, January 9, 1983, LI2.

6. Stuart Preston, “Gallery Roundup,” New York Times, May 25, 1952, X9.

7. Rosenberg, “After Next, What?,” in The Anxious Object, 259.

8. Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 96.